A reader who identifies as “Democracy” left a comment here about DeSantis’ war against the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) courses. DeSantis manufactured a culture war issue, a familiar tactic for him, but don’t defend the AP exams: They are worthless, says he or she.
Democracy wrote:
While I certainly do not agree with — and am appalled by — the Florida dictate, I hate to see the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) program in the bannerhead of this issue because it makes it appear that the AP program is somehow being victimized, and it helps to propagate the AP brand.
It’s important to separate the wheat from the chaff here. The Florida requirement – state law – is part of a larger effort by conservatives (Republicans) across the country to, as USA Today put it, “restrict learning and materials about controversial topics.” Or, in other words, topics that conservatives hate to talk about: racism, misogyny, equality, sedition, tolerance, democracy, reproductive rights, climate change, sex…..
The original law required a cataloging of all books in “a school library media center.” The DeSantis-controlled Florida DOE interpreted that broadly to include classrooms. The Republican legislature amended the law to say that a school library media center is
“any collection of books, ebooks, periodicals, or videos maintained and accessible on the site of a school, including in classrooms.”
As The Sarasota Herald Tribune reported in April of this year,
“The law, governing instructional materials for classes from kindergarten to 12th grade, passed last year and holds school districts responsible for the content of all materials used in a classroom, made available in a school library or included on a reading list. It requires each book in a school library to be certified by a media specialist and for a list of these materials to be available on school websites. The law took effect in January.”
This is incredibly cumbersome, especially for elementary school teachers who have large troves of books for their students. And if it reeks of conservative religious state-imposed censorship, that’s probably because it is. As ABC News (and other media) reported, “Books targeted by conservative groups were overwhelmingly written by or about people of color and LGBTQ people, according to anti-censorship researchers.”
All of this is worrisome. It’s dangerous territory.
But that does not mean that AP is the victim. Nor should it imply that AP is actually educationally beneficial for most students. As I’ve noted here previously, more colleges and universities are either refusing to accept AP test scores for credit, or they are limiting credit awarded only for a score of 5 on an AP test. The reason is that they find most students awarded credit for AP courses are just generally not well-prepared.
Dartmouth no longer gives credit for AP test scores. It found that 90 percent of those who scored a 5 on the AP psychology test failed a Dartmouth Intro to Psych exam. A 2006 MIT faculty report noted “there is ‘a growing body of research’ that students who earn top AP scores and place out of institute introductory courses end up having ‘difficulty’ when taking the next course.” Two years prior, Harvard “conducted a study that found students who are allowed to skip introductory courses because they have passed a supposedly equivalent AP course do worse in subsequent courses than students who took the introductory courses at Harvard.”
In The ToolBox Revisited (2006) Clifford Adelman scolded those who had misrepresented his original ToolBox research by citing the importance of AP “in explaining bachelor’s degree completion. Adelman said, “To put it gently, this is a misreading.” Moreover, in statistically analyzing the factors contributing to the earning of a bachelor’s degree, Adelman found that Advanced Placement did not reach the “threshold level of significance.”
College Board executives often say that if high schools implement AP courses and encourage more students to take them, then (1) more students will be motivated to go to college and (2) high school graduation rates will increase. There are educators who parrot the College Board line. Researchers Kristin Klopfenstein and Kathleen Thomas “conclude that there is no evidence to back up these claims.”
Why do students take AP? Because they’ve been told to. Because they’re “trying to look good” to colleges in the “increasingly high-stakes college admission process,” and because, increasingly, “high schools give extra weight to AP courses when calculating grade-point averages, so it can boost a student’s class rank.” It’s a depraved stupid circle that has swept up parents, guidance counselors, administrators and school boards, teachers, and the general public – not to mention public education reporters – into the misbelief that “AP is better.” It isn’t.
One student who got caught up in the AP hype cycle –– taking 3 AP courses as a junior and 5 as a senior –– and only got credit for one AP course in college, reflected on his AP experience. He said nothing about “rigor” or “trying to be educated” or the quality of instruction, but remarked “if i didn’t take AP classes, it’s likely I wouldn’t have gotten accepted into the college I’m attending next year…If your high school offers them, you pretty much need to take them if you want to get into a competitive school.”
What do students actually learn from taking these “rigorous” AP courses and tests? For many, not much. One student remarked, after taking the World History AP test, “dear jesus… I had hoped to never see ‘DBQ’ ever again, after AP world history… so much hate… so much hate.”
And another added, “I was pretty fond of the DBQ’s, actually, because you didn’t really have to know anything about the subject, you could just make it all up after reading the documents.”
Another AP student related how the “high achievers” in his school approached AP tests: “The majority of high-achieving kids in my buddies' and my AP classes couldn’t have given less of a crap. They showed up for most of the classes, sure, and they did their best to keep up with the grades because they didn’t want their GPAs to drop, but when it came time to take the tests, they drew pictures on the AP Calc, answered just ‘C’ on the AP World History, and would finish sections of the AP Chem in, like, 5 minutes. I had one buddy who took an hour-and-a-half bathroom break during World History. The cops were almost called. They thought he was missing.”
And an AP reader (grader), related this about the types of essays he saw:
“I read AP exams in the past. Most memorable was an exam book with $5 taped to the page inside and the essay just said ‘please, have mercy.’ But I also got an angry breakup letter, a drawing of some astronauts, all kinds of random stuff. I can’t really remember it all… I read so many essays in such compressed time periods that it all blurs together when I try to remember.”
The Florida law is clearly not in the interests of kids and learning. But AP ain’t necessarily all that either.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
While I certainly don’t trust the College Board, I’m not sure that I trust studies from Harvard or Dartmouth any more. What about studies on AP with regards to normal students in state schools and smaller private liberal arts schools (i.e., the vast majority of students)? So long as college is so ridiculously expensive, students and their parents are going to look for ways to save money, and testing out of classes by taking free versions in high school seems like a good way to do that. I would also be interested in hearing if state schools and smaller private schools are also starting to not accept AP credit, or is it only the elitist Ivies?
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My experience with my kids who took AP classes was mixed. Depending on the teacher there did not have to be a lot beyond rote instruction. How much critical thinking was required really depended on the teacher. By the way, while they got “credit” for 4 or 5, it did not change what they needed to take for a major. It saved us no money, thank goodness, since the level of instruction in college was far more rigorous.
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I think you missed the point.
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When I took AP American History in 1972, my only AP course, AP meant something. I got a four and it was accepted by the University of Buffalo as a B which I used towards my distribution.
When my daughter took AP Government thirty years later, her only AP course, she only got a one, which didn’t count. However, it was an excellent course with an amazing teacher and I hope she got a lot out of it. At tte very least it gave her a small taste on the expectations of college courses.
However, now everyone takes AP exams in almost all subjects which dilutes the meaning of what AP used to mean. When schools are ranked, the number of AP courses available is an important part of the ranking. Students also feel obligated to take these AP classes to raise their GPA and to look better on their college applications.
I agree, the AP exam has lost its significance. Plus, if getting a five doesn’t translate into true knowledge on the subject or at least enough to qualify them for the next level of college courses in that subject area, then what good does all that extra work really mean.
AP has become a money maker, not an educational tool. Let’s allow high school students to be young people without the burden of all those AP courses. There’s time enough to be a college student when they are Freshmen at the university of their choice.
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There has never been a golden age of AP. It has always suffered the onto-epistemological problem to which you point: “Plus, if getting a five doesn’t translate into true knowledge on the subject or at least enough to qualify them for the next level of college courses in that subject area, then what good does all that extra work really mean.”
No grade whether letter, number or short descriptor like proficient, excelling, etc. . . can ever “translate into true knowledge”. Or perhaps better said is “true knowledge can’t ever be validly described by a single score or word.”
What someone knows is a complex of many different thoughts, abilities, capabilities, actions, reactions, etc. . . , that no single score or word can correctly assess.
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AP is just another scam and I’ve been saying it for 5-6 yrs now on this very blog. About 6 yrs ago, a large portion of the exclusive/expensive private schools in the DC area dropped AP because their students were bored and didn’t want to take them anymore AND the teachers didn’t want to stick to the “AP script”. It turns out that the regular curriculum prior to adopting AP was much more fun, engaging and rigorous for students. While the private schools are dropping it, the public systems are adopting “AP for All” and starting kids in the 9th grade. It’s a ridiculous waste of time, energy and money and the kids aren’t getting the education that they deserve.
If you want some proof about how awful AP Psych is, just Google AP Psych brain projects and find images. It’s an art project!!!!….done by EVERY student taking that class and it’s just wasted time as busy work.
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The problem with AP classes is that it is not what it used to be. AP came from a realization that some students were actuaslly prepared for the advancement of classes at a second year college level based on their high school experience. So there were some tests, AP being one and CLEP being another, to try to gauge who would find freshman comp at Greatoldbig State University such a bore that they might quit college. Then College Board got into the business of selling its wares, offering courses on how a student might be prepared for these tests. This changedd the game of course.
I was, in 1973, both the beneficiary of AP and an example of its potential harm. I was awarded 6 hours of college credit for English Composition, a required course for freshmen, and allowed to take second year English. My fellows waded through a morass of stultifying instruction for an entire year, most reporting a lot of quibbling over commas and sentence fragments AND NUMERICAL GRADES insstead of class discussions of good literature. But I did not take a test over American History. When I got to that class, I encountered the man teaching it who would become like a father to me.
The operant question for society, it seems to me is simple: If AP (or dual credit) is for our best minds, why do we want to expose our best minds to less instruction?
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“The problem with AP classes is that it is not what it used to be.”
One wouldn’t expect AP or any class to be the same now as in 1973. There has never been a golden age of AP as it has always suffered the many onto-epistemological (foundational conceptual) invalidities identified by N. Wilson.
“The operant question for society, it seems to me is simple: If AP (or dual credit) is for our best minds, why do we want to expose our best minds to less instruction?”
How are “our best minds” determined?
What about those with the “worst minds”? And how is that determined?
Why rank students on a worst to best scale so that some may benefit and others lose out?
Should it not be the students and their parents who determine what the student studies?
Allow me to quote Wilson about categorizing/ranking students from his essay review of the standards and testing bible:
“To the extent that these categorisations [best/worst] are accurate or valid at an individual level, these decisions may be both ethically acceptable to the decision makers, and rationally and emotionally acceptable to the test takers and their advocates. They accept the judgments of their society regarding their mental or emotional capabilities. But to the extent that such categorisations are invalid, they must be deemed unacceptable to all concerned.
Further, to the extent that this invalidity is hidden or denied, they are all involved in a culture of symbolic violence. This is violence related to the meaning of the categorisation event where, firstly, the real source of violation, the state or educational institution that controls the meanings of the categorisations, are disguised, and the authority appears to come from another source, in this case from professional opinion backed by scientific research. . . .
And finally a symbolically violent event is one in which what is manifestly unjust is asserted to be fair and just. In the case of testing, where massive errors and thus miscategorisations are suppressed, scores and categorisations are given with no hint of their large invalidity components. It is significant that in the chapter on Rights and responsibilities of test users, considerable attention is given to the responsibility of the test taker not to cheat. Fair enough. But where is the balancing responsibility of the test user not to cheat, not to pretend that a test event has accuracy vastly exceeding technical or social reality? Indeed where is the indication to the test taker of any inaccuracy at all, except possibly arithmetic additions?”
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I have taught three different AP courses: AP European History, AP World History and AP Comparative Government.
I have mixed feelings about AP.
The fact that colleges are decreasingly likely to accept AP credit has more to do with money then preparedness. Colleges want students to take classes in college.
However, I will say that when David Coleman took the leadership role at AP he did his best to make it as Common Core as possible. The changes they made to AP European History and AP World History were demanding on the teachers and the students. I harbored extreme dislike for the first essay rubrics that AP put out there for the history courses.
The trick is for teachers to leverage the parts of the AP curriculum that they like and adapt otherwise to their student populations. I’ve done this with AP Comparative Government with considerable success. The course has provided students with a better understanding of global politics in a way that would otherwise make for an elective that had little appeal. I’ve used lengthy simulations to make theoretical ideas more concrete.
So while I’m not in complete disagreement with AP / College Board critics, I’d say that AP can be leveraged quite well if a teacher is willing to free themselves with the curriculum when a learning opportunity is available for students. Without AP Comparative Government, I would have one-third the students learning about these global concepts. But I don’t follow the curriculum step-by-step.
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“The trick is for teachers to leverage the parts of the AP curriculum that they like and adapt otherwise to their student populations…..AP can be leveraged quite well if a teacher is willing to free themselves with the curriculum when a learning opportunity is available for students. …..I don’t follow the curriculum step-by-step.”
I agree 100%.
But this is true for ALL classes! I don’t understand why anyone thinks a teacher who teaches out of some non-AP textbook is somehow doing something different. The ones who go beyond the curriculum are offering far better courses than the ones who stick to the textbook or curriculum, whether it is an AP class or non-AP class.
And I’d argue that the AP curriculum, problematic as it can be, is more interesting than some random course textbook, and if the teacher is unwilling to go beyond the curriculum, an AP class is going to be better.
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Students typically take an AP World History course in 9th or 10 grade. Do you think these students are “college ready?”
And, does ANYone need AP to teach government?
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The College Board is awful. AP courses are a stressful, damaging part of a so-called high achievement game. My school abandoned them in 1999 to the benefit of all. There was nothing in an AP course that a good teacher couldn’t do better. The banishing of AP had no effect on college admissions.
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AP was a replacement for the College Board’s subject matter exams. Back in the ‘50s, I took the SAT (reading and math) in the morning, then chose three content areas in which to take the exam in the afternoon. There were many subjects. The students chose the three they wanted to take. No college credit.
The College board makes much more money by having the SAT as one test, and AP as a course and tests.
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Ah, the SAT.
The National Center for Education Statistics tell us this about the SAT: ”The SAT (formerly known as the Scholastic Assessment Test and the Scholastic Aptitude Test) is not designed as an indicator of student achievement, but rather as an aid for predicting how well students will do in college.”
The problem, however, is that the SAT is a very poor predictor of college success.
College enrollment specialists find that it predicts between about 3 and 14 percent of the variance in freshman-year college grades (and after that zilch). As one college enrollment specialist quipped, “I might as well measure their shoe size.”
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And yet, Steve, LOTS parents and principals and superintendents, and students, believe the College Board hype that “AP is better.”
I agree with you. It isn’t.
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Regular readers of this blog will know what I think of David Coleman and his puerile, almost entirely content-free “standards” and of his new Cored SAT, which he should have named the Scholastic Common Core Assessment Test, or SCCAT. But scat, of course, has uses as fertilizer.
My grandmother used to remind me always to have something good to say. So, I’ll say this one good thing about the College Board. Their textbook for AP Composition, The Language of Composition, is (or was when I used it) outstanding. The composition test itself is ridiculous. But the text is great. An outstanding conventional rhetoric.
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I so agree with this writer. In-fact my last blog post called for ending AP. https://tultican.com/2023/08/29/roll-back-advanced-placement/
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DBQs. Love them. If well designed, they can give kids a sense of what historians actually do and, importantly, what limitations and difficulties for interpretation are presented by the historical record. People really don’t have a sense of this until they actually dig into the docs. History is a lot more nebulous and constructed, even confabulated, than people typically realize.
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What does DBQ mean”
Is it barbeque from Detroit. . .or perhaps Denver. . . Dallas? Dairy Queen?
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mean? not mean”
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to mean or not to mean, that is the question.
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I just was in the process of writing a note that started as follows:
Before Duane comes on to ask what DBQ means, let me say that it means Document-based questioning. It involves giving students actual historical primary source documents and having them study these and draw conclusions, just as historians do. This is extremely valuable because it teaches them a) what historians do and b) how interpretive the writing of history is–part fact, part conjecture, part pure confabulation, lol. Most people think that history is a lot more clear than it actually is. I became quite aware of this when I was working in a textbook house and was insisting that my editors do thorough fact checking of the history material. WOW! That was eye-opening. People often do not know from the actual surviving material what they think they know.
A classic example of a DBQ is to give kids one of the Bills of Mortality compiled by John Gaunt, in the 1660s, listing causes of death in London over the period of several years. Then, one asks what people can figure out about live in London, then, based on this material. Gaunt was a father of modern actuarial science and created the first tables of predictions of life span of people at various ages–a fundamental tool of the insurance industry.
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Thanks for the clarification!
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cx: John Graunt
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For example, students will be surprised to see, in Graunt’s tables, the shockingly large number of people who died each year, back then, from “Toothache.” In a time before antibiotics, an infected tooth could and did, often, kill.
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One thing of fishing backwoods streams (they call them rivers but are barely what we call creeks) when I lived in MA I would stumble across very old cemeteries in which, inevitably, I’d find quite a few mother and newborn gravestones. Life without antibiotics could be brutal.
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so sad, this
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So, London in 1660, America today. Both places with obscenely bad dental care. The U.S. is the only advanced industrial democracy that doesn’t have national dental care, especially for seniors. And so we have a nation of seniors–all those who aren’t rich, whose teeth are rotting in their mouths. Like George Washington’s.
Isn’t it great to live in such an exceptional country?
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What teeth?
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At any rate, I thought it hilarious, Duane, that you asked that question at the very time that I was writing a note predicting that you would ask that question. LMAO.
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I’m going to have to change my ways. I’m getting too predictable.
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I love this. I, too, share your antipathy for all the acronyms in education. I think of the AP at my last school who insisted on us using the R.A.C.E. approach to instruction. LOL.
Paint by numbers.
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DBQ is a document based question.
You read the “document,” then answer questions about what it says. You need not know anything about the topic. It’s a reading test on a history exam.
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As Diane says, this DBQ stuff has no place on exams.
DBQs are doing history.
Historians have a few things to work with: artifacts, old documents, and people’s recollections/oral histories. Again, actually looking at the documents and figuring out what they tell us about a time and place is illuminating. A superb exercise in critical thinking. And a warning about the dangers of hasty generalization.
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My regular old high school European history class used DBQs back in the dark ages. The teacher was excellent.
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Bob, I agree with you that DBQs (for high school students, not for young ones) are invaluable for teaching students to think.
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By the way New York put DBQ questions on its 4th grade social studies test that even my ELLs were required to take. Most of my advanced ELLs were able to pass the test, even the written response portion of it. Some of the documents were written in antiquated, erudite English, although the Spanish speakers also had access to a Spanish version of the test. Unfortunately, many of them had not learned to read in Spanish. The crazy world of high expectations!
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A 4th grade test.
That’s just freaking idiotic. DBQs are an advanced undertaking. High school, college, grad school.
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Is it rigor or rigor mortis?
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IT’S DISGUSTING THAT THE LIKES OF BILLY BOY GATES AND DAVID COLEMAN AND ARNE DUNCAN AND MICHELLE RHEE AND ALL THE OTHER DEFORMERS HAVE RUINED BY MISUSE SUCH PERFECTLY FINE AND USEFUL WORDS AS “DATA” AND “RIGOR.” CURSES ON THEM FOR THAT.
WHY THE CAPS? I’M SHOUTING AT THEM, THE FOOLS.
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I’ve seen that kind of garbage, RT. Sure, let’s give the kids passages in 15th century English:
And anoþer maner worchinge of oure quinta essencia is þis / Take þe noblest and þe strengest brennynge watir þat ȝe may haue distillid out of pure myȝty wiyn, and putte it into a glas clepid amphora, with a long necke / and close þe mouþ strongly wiþ wex; And loke þat half or þe þridde part be fulle; and birie it al in hors dounge, preparate as it is seid hereafter / so þat þe necke of þe glas be turned dounward, & þe botum be turned vpward, þat by vertu of þe hors dounge þe quinta essencia ascende vp to þe botum.
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That’s from a 15th-century English book on how to make alcohol and how to use it. In medieval philosophy, quintessence was the fifth and highest element, the ether, found in the celestial spheres. But in this book, the term is used for alcohol, which shows how highly the author regards it. The author attributes his work to a legendary ancient genius and demigod, Hermes Trismegistus, the author, supposedly, of the Hermetica. Weirdly, from ancient times up through the early Renaissance, people often attributed their own work to ancient sages to lend it credibility. That’s why I am going to attribute my next book to Helen of Troy.
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Pagan Moon, by Helen of Troy, as told to Robert D. Shepherd
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When my son was in public MS (8th grade), the History teacher assigned 6 DBQ’s every 2 weeks……but he never graded them or even gave them back to the students. He would wait until the grades needed to be posted into Canvas and then just give the kids a grade based on them turning in the stupid DBQ assignments. The guy was moved down from the HS so that he could “teach” the kids how to write DBQ’a so that they would score well on the AP test…..AND the guy was a complete jerk telling the kids how stupid they were for not knowing/learning any history! Last straw for me…private school here we come!
In my district the HS students were pushed into AP for All or Dual enrollment with the local community college. I don’t know which one was worse?
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Lisa, the reason he didn’t read and grade the DBQs was that if he assigned six to each kid and taught seven classes, each with, say 28 kids in it, he would have 168 of these to read and comment on!!!! Days and days of dedicated work, on top of teaching and preparing classes and everything else. That’s why English teachers need small class sizes and teachers’ assistants.
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Bob, if a teacher isn’t willing to grade the “busy work” that they send home, then they shouldn’t assign it (from my sister who taught for over 30 yrs!). It was his choice to assign 6 DBQ’s every 2 weeks for homework. He didn’t even grade tests and send them back in a reasonable amount of time. If it didn’t mean that much to him, it certainly isn’t going to mean too much to the students required to do the stupid work.
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LisaM,
For a long time, teachers had the bizarre idea that they had to copyedit (mark up) every scrap of writing that students do. But if they do that, then students will write too little, because copyediting is incredibly time-consuming. It takes longer to do than to write something from scratch.
I used to tell teachers in training that students must, if they are going to get any good at writing, write far, far, far more than any teacher could possibly grade in the sense of copyediting and responding to each piece in written comments. To learn to write well, one must write A LOT (and read a lot, too), so it’s essential that students get A LOT of practice–I would say at least a substantive piece of writing two times a week, in addition to short written response and written bellwork. In my last year of my last high-school teaching job, I had 213 students. There’s no way that I could copyedit twol substantive pieces by each student, or 436 pieces (if these were standard five-paragraph themes, that would be 2,180 paragraphs to copyedit and comment on and grade with a rubric EVERY WEEK, in addition to preparing and teaching classes and doing all the absurd busy work piled on teacher by administrators these days.
Impossible.
So, I would advise novice teachers (and the older ones who hadn’t figured this stuff out) to have the students keep portfolios and put all their writing in these–typically, rough outlines, drafts, and finished, peer reviewed and revised pieces (peer reviewed against a rubric). Periodically, the teacher would go through these portfolios and GLANCE OVER each piece and give credit for it (a zero, a minus, a check, a plus). Then, each student, in consultation with the teacher if necessary, would periodically choose ONE piece for the teacher to grade closely–applying a grading rubric to it, doing SOME copyediting (that’s a whole long explanation that I’m not going to get into here; those teachers who mark EVERY ERROR ARE MAKING A BIG MISTAKE), making comments throughout and at the end, and assigning a grade and an opportunity to improve the grade, a bit, if needed, by doing a rewrite. I would explain this stuff to parents during year opening orientation and in a note posted to each class web portal (which I was required to maintain and did, joyfully, because that’s a REALLY USEFUL tool.
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cx: 426 pieces, 2130 paragraphs
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I am a big believer in giving, as part of the writing assignment, a complete model of a finished piece; a blow-by-blow structural description of the piece (a “recipe” for it); and a rubric showing what criteria it will be graded on. The structural description and rubric are both useful for peer review. Of course, time will prevent peer review of every piece of writing done, and besides, people need to learn to review their own work, by themselves, as well as to respond to critique.
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If you want to be a good writer, you have to write a lot. You have to read EVEN MORE. The problem is that students don’t read and write enough. It usually falls only to the English teachers to teach reading and writing. Students should be reading (real books – not just textbooks) and writing in EVERY subject.
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Totally agree, Mamie!
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Yes. In every class!!!!
Which also means, if students are going to write this much, that people must give up the notion that teachers have to copyedit every piece of writing that kids do and make written comments on it. That’s NOT DOABLE. But the common perception is that that’s what teachers are supposed to do. See LisaM’s comment on this as an example. LisaM is a smart person, but on this, she is wrong.
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As I noted in my comment, one AP student pointed out WHY (s)he loved DBQs:
“I was pretty fond of the DBQ’s, actually, because you didn’t really have to know anything about the subject, you could just make it all up after reading the documents.”
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Well, this student was a little right and a little wrong. Yes, you can operate almost entirely in response to the text (which, as Diane pointed out, makes it a reading task). But no, in terms of the overall picture of historical interpretation, what you get from one doc has to be made consistent with what you and others have gotten from all the docs and the artifacts and the living memory, ofc. And that’s what doing history is. Also, if the takeaway from the largely independent nature of the specific task is that it’s a trivial undertaking, that’s really false for a long list of obvious reasons. I don’t think anyone could reasonably argue that studying historical documents is useless.
Case in point. One of the classes I used to teach was American Literature, which I taught as a history of ideas course. Down the hall from me was an ultra-conservative American History teacher. One day, my students said to me, “Mr. [fire breather[ says that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery.” So, the next class, I brought in statements of secession made by various states and we had a look at these. And there it was: they boldly said that motivating their decision was the audacity of the North in attempting to end slavery. So, part of doing history well is saying, OK, what do the documents actually say? Often, of course, they say complex and contradictory things because, well, events are often complex and contradictory, not nice and simply as distilled into the typical K-12 history textbook.
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The public schools have suffered from a gifted as credentialed trap for decades. I once had a conversation with an in-law who was very accomplished as a chemist and we both agreed that neither of us had to jump the gifted-honors- AP(IB) hurdle and we became successful adults. I wish I had a more challenging curriculum coming out of high school because I felt I was behind the academic curve when I entered college. However, I had a desire to work and think and that became the critical key to making it through a college with a well earned academic reputation. I achieved some level of academic honor though certainly not among the best and brightest at my school. What I valued more when reflecting on high school was that I was not constrained by the busy work given to today’s college bound students that takes away their time to explore intellectual endeavors not required by the classroom. It is a mistake to equate academic prowess with giftedness. The very definition of giftedness is that it is impossible to measure adequately. The rush to AP as an end all for college readiness is that is too often the culmination of the GATE mindset places students on a pedestal that constantly tells them they are above challenge. I have seen too many go to college and struggle, sometimes dropout, because they were not prepared to confront intellectual challenge beyond profound recall. AP, like many of the privatized education entities, is first a business that sells a product through the credential of reputation over results. The existence of AP implies that without it we do not have a professional teaching force that can deliver results without prepared curricula credentialed from on high. All the money we spend to keep companies like College Board in business could be better used to improve preparation and support of teachers who would get better results.
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I think your prescription here would apply to many, if not most, academic endeavors. I did not go through a teacher education program, but took courses that matched the state requirements for certification. This was because my college was fundamentally liberal arts and did not offer vocational degrees. Therefore, I basically took enough hours in psychology that would have been a minor in many circumstances and a history of education course, perhaps the toughest class I have taken, that had a profound impact on my perspectives about education. I was fundamentally and Art major. When I got my Masters in Art Education, I became thankful that I was first a Fine Arts major and not an art education major, because I had a deeper understanding of media and expression than did my cohort at the time. I believe if we made teaching a desired profession, it would require a vigorous (notice I did not write rigorous) liberal arts undergraduate degree, then a multi-year graduate program where students acted as interns in schools while taking course work in pedagogy, politics, curriculum, sociology, and psychology. Like medicine and law, specialization would come at the end of the degree. We have to stop looking at teacher certification as a “jack of all trades” degree.
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Knowledge of the subject is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Unfortunately, in ELA, people come out of school not knowing a lot of things that an English teacher needs to know in order to be good at his or her job. This will be a serious profession again when people figure out that one cannot be a qualified English teacher on the basis of simply taking a few lit classes and some teacher prep over in the education school. I have long gotten over being shocked about the breathtaking ignorance of their subject of a lot of English teachers today, but I have not gotten over being PO’d about this. This is a serious undertaking. It requires serious preparation, as serious as that which a cardiac surgeon undertakes. I am not kidding about this. I am quite serious.
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So my question becomes, how do we make this happen? Too many fail to see how critical it is for a teaching force that is academically and socially astute, and that it takes years to get teachers there. I often reflect on contemporary brain science that claims executive function does not mature until around 25. Putting 22 year olds in charge of the classroom is just as problematic as asking an undergraduate chemistry major to conduct heart surgery. Good teaching requires expertise and the time necessary to get there.
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Well, part of the answer is to address teacher preparation. That’s why I wrote that little essay about preparing ELA teachers. Universities need to change their programs along these lines–to get serious about preparing people for this job.
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his should be the focus of the Secretary of Education over everything else.
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Go back and look at my list, Paul. Frighteningly, most English teachers I have met recently–the young ones coming out of our schools–know almost none of this stuff. They can’t write an iambic pentameter line. They can’t explain how to create melody in a speaking voice. They don’t know what a Bildungsroman is. They can’t tell you what the main principles are of New Criticism. They can’t tell you what the Grateful Dead motif is in folk orature. They can’t tell you what the letters C, A, N, O, and E stand for in the standard personality model. They can’t write rubrics for a writing assignment. They can’t do the calculation for grading on a curve. They can’t tell you what Samuel Johnson is most famous for or how to write a genus and differentia definition. They don’t know how to format a play or a film script. And so on. In short, they are utterly unprepared. HOW the _______ can they teach ENGLISH if they do not know the freaking subject.
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As I wrote earlier, this is not limited to ELA. Our culture does not value the teacher as expert or scholarly practitioner. It amazes me the number of times I have encountered such teachers in spite of this deficit. Just think what could happen if we made this the priority.
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Amen to that Paul!
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A lot of professional education types, these days, think that all this is just useless academic stuff. WRONG. All these things are TOOLS TO THINK WITH, important parts of our cultural heritage, hard won by our ancestors, to be learned and passed down to kids so that they can think, too. So, a Bildungsroman is a novel about growing up. It begins with a loss. This is followed by a change of circumstances (a journey or quest) in the course of which the protagonist encounters challenges and obstacles and learns some things and unlearns others and so overcomes them, thereby growing and achieving maturity. So, having THAT MODEL in mind (This is a Bildungsroman. This is how a Bildungsroman works.) enables the reader TO SEE WHAT’S THERE. Jane Eyre. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Huck Finn. Sons and Lovers. Black Boy. Catcher in the Rye. A Secret Garden. Great Expectations. The Book Thief. To Kill a Mockingbird. These and thousands more, all Bildungsromane (or Bildungsromans, if Anglicized). And knowing what a Bildungsroman is and how it works is one key to grokking them.
IF a teacher doesn’t know that key, he or she can’t teach it.
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Utterly unprepared. Utterly ignorant of their subject.
When I was a kid, I had English teachers who knew this stuff. Mostly older women, back then.
What the heck happened!
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It’s gotten so bad now, so lax, that when people read my reasonable proposal for English teacher prep, they think it way over the top. No, it’s not. This is the minimum that an English teacher needs to know to start doing the job.
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I agree, Bob. I teach just as much English grammar as I do French grammar. Younger teachers know none of it. The problem is that grammar and spelling are not explicitly taught anymore. They’re not considered important. My husband is an English teacher and extremely well-read. He always says a lot of the things you say in your essay. We’re all from a different education system. We’re dinosaurs. Furthermore, I’ve always believed that a strong Liberal Arts education should be the foundation of any teaching degree. But, hey, who am I?
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Totally with you.
In my last school, my department chairperson was standing in the mailroom, looking at the state curriculum guidelines for one of her classes. One item on it was Gerunds. She asked me, “What’s a gerund? We’re supposed to teach that.”
My department chairperson
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Not sure of her age, but perhaps 25, 26
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I would say that the 3 fundamental qualities of a good teacher are:
1. EXTENSIVE KNOWLEDGE of your subject area. There’s no way around this one!
2. The ability to ORGANIZE a coherent daily lesson and also see the bigger picture of the whole course you’re teaching.
3. The ability to EXPLAIN AND PRESENT material clearly and in a variety of ways and to know what activities best help students to learn the material. This also means being able to OBSERVE HOW students learn best and give proper activities. It also means knowing YOUR OWN teaching style and learning style so that you can broaden your own way of teaching. That’s just my 2 cents after over 30 years of teaching. But, hey! Who am I? 🙂
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Well said, Mamie! Yes.
I would add empathy for and patience with learners, including the ability to allow inconclusiveness to hang in the air while students struggle, sometimes, to come to things independently. I emphatically DO NOT think that we should follow a primarily discovery method, but it’s important for teachers not to do all the work for the kids. We’ve all seen this and caught ourselves doing it–posing questions and then answering themselves without giving kids the opportunity to grapple with them–via a peer interaction, for example, or one of those clicker quizzes or whatever. The guy who said, “To be once in doubt is to be once resolved” was Iago, the villain.
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I agree, Bob. I wonder if some of the things teachers do to speed things up is because of the enormous amount of material they have to cover in too short a time. And when one is under pressure, one tends to speed up. 🙂 Also it’s perhaps due to having differing abilities in the same class. I’ve dealt with this my whole career. It’s really tough.
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YES!!!
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The patience of a saint, Bob. The patience of a saint and the love of mind-numbing repetition. 🙂
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haaaa!!!
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I have proctored AP exams at a high school where I have taught, so I think I have some insight into the kids’ (whom I by and large adore) readiness for more advanced university courses. I’d estimate maybe 20% of the students who score well on AP tests have the skill sets and knowledge base to succeed at 200-level classes, and for elite universities, make that 10%. And I couldn’t agree more with the final statement: “All the money….”
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I’ve written before here about my experience with AP’s. About 20 years ago, a colleague and I set up an intensive curriculum for our talented native Spanish speakers, which allowed them to showcase their language capabilities, culminating with their third year in an AP Spanish course. At the time, my colleague designed her own course, nothing was submitted to the College Board, she took no “training.” Every one of our students got a passing AP grade, the vast majority 4’s and 5’s.
Our kids with kind of weak English language scores (as it was their second or third language) now could demonstrate to interested colleges a high test score in Spanish. Students who might have gone under the radar in the admissions office now got offers – with $$$. We helped to open a pipeline because accepted students demonstrated their abilities once on campus, so admissions officers realized our graduates were well prepared for college life. For example, we sent a bunch of students to Smith College with abundant scholarships.
Then, a version of AP for All, MA Math and Science Institute, was imposed on our school. As one of Boston’s three selective admissions schools (entrance by exam), about 85% of the student population were kids of color, and given they were successful at standardized tests, it was a lock that this demonstration that “marginalized” students could pass AP’s would succeed. After all, our kids weren’t marginalized at school – they were the mainstream! It was underwritten by Bill and Melinda and Exxon; its head in MA was a retired Army Lt. Colonel, Morton Orlov II (shades of Mike Miles).
That program turned our school upside down – AP’s were scheduled with priority over other classes, kids began to believe they needed to carry 4 AP’s each semester to go to college; students were required to attend Saturday classes, teachers in the program had to attend extra trainings as well as teach the Saturday classes. Our students’ parents had no way to discern as most students were first generation to apply to college. Those not involved – kids and staff – were treated as second class. Even our middle schoolers felt the heat as a separate program was funded to have kids take SAT’s early – 7th grade early!
Of course, the College Board made tons of money, selling (then) CD-ROMS, textbooks that were test prep and training for teachers. It was madness. The testing periods were tense and chaotic because teachers could not test their own students, so alternate coverage was needed and regular classes were shut down to accommodate AP tests – for most of May and into June. Talk about high stakes!
I saw the consequences play out in my own kids’ experiences. The oldest was able to parlay four AP classes into a semester’s worth of college credits, allowing her to graduate (combined with summer classes) in three years rather than four and saved a year’s tuition. When my next two were applying to colleges four years later, selective institutions were no longer interested in AP’s. One admission counselor told me frankly: “That credential has been devalued.” Market saturation had been achieved.
Cui bono? we may well ask.
Folks may be interested in Annie Abrams’ book: Shortchanged: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students
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What a wonderful program you and your colleague created, Christine!!!
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Thanks, Bob.
I follow some of those students on LinkedIn and they’ve gone on to do terrific things: one works at the state ed department; another is chief of staff for our superintendent; one is the city social worker on call for victims of trauma and violence; two, who were indifferent students, have brought back neighborhood baseball leagues for middle schoolers. Many more are working 9-5 and raising their kiddos. It’s so gratifying to see them take their places as contributors to our community.
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Again, that’s just awesome! I suspected, smart and compassionate as you are, that you had a string of such success stories behind you. They were lucky to have you as their teacher!!!!
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Aww, Bob, now I’m blushing!
But really, that’s just what the work is.
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Exactly
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Why do students take AP? Because they’ve been told to. Because they’re “trying to look good” to colleges in the “increasingly high-stakes college admission process,” and because, increasingly, “high schools give extra weight to AP courses when calculating grade-point averages, so it can boost a student’s class rank.” It’s a depraved stupid circle that has swept up parents, guidance counselors, administrators and school boards, teachers, and the general public – not to mention public education reporters – into the misbelief that “AP is better.” It isn’t.
This article brought up some memories not only as the “Summer Guy” who helped the kids who failed AP because they were misplaced (badly), but as a parent who paid a lot of money for my sons to take AP courses because, well, “they are way better.” And, of course, the more students a school has in AP courses, it looks better on the WASC report.
When I was in high school, I didn’t know if we had AP courses. I was in the upper echelon of students, but I didn’t know if I had honors or what. I do know though, I took a writing test for UC Berkeley (English 4) and to the dismay of the instructor (we had our issues) I scored the highest in the class. Funny, his name was “Mr. Cotter.”
My son took all AP courses. He is an excellent student. He did not pass one. I did tell him, “You can drop the course if you want.” He said, “Dad, I want to be in this class because the other classes have too much noise and a ton of discipline issues.” I asked the teacher for her advice (she was in high regard because she taught all AP) how my son was doing. She told me to go to the AP web site for advice. Another huh? Okay, no worries as we always honored their choices. He told me that the students at that time were the upper 4% of the school and basically taught themselves. AP was stressful and a ton of note taking, memorizing, and having an example for a plethora of FRQ/DBQs. AP was “no frills” and no “learn by doing projects.” It was all about passing the AP College exam. After he didn’t pass his first set of exams (and it was not for a lack of study because his group was at our house nearly every night), I said, “Who passed?” He told me of a student. I knew his mom (she was on the school board) and he was a former student of mine. He told me the key to passing was having a solid example for whatever FRQ they threw at him (he was also a brilliant student with a photographic memory). He went on to tell me that he and his buddies all took AP exams and passed, but studied differently. He took AP classes, well because that’s what the school told him to do. His next friend studied from Cliffsnotes (did not take an AP class), and the last friend was an avid reader (no AP class) and passed the exam. My son told me that the College Board threw in a “free Econ” test where the kids could take, but they all looked at and within five minutes said, “Enough already.” Here’s the kicker, when I asked him (AP is the realm of the most enlightened and so much better than everything else), “Do you know how to register to vote?” He did not. “Huh?”
When I went to Chicago to study at the Arts Institute, teachers from around the country were there. We had a lengthy discussion about AP courses and students getting credit to “skip over 101” classes. I believe the consensus was: every college has a personal methodology in their series of courses. To skip one would leave many students lost on the college’s approach to learning through the series. My son concurred. “Dad, I am so glad I did not get to skip over Music Theory 101 because the way AP taught it and the way my college taught it were completely different.” And another thing comes to mind as many of my students were heading to community college. Correct me on this, but I don’t think AP applies to community college, right? But, it’s “Waaaay better.” All I know is younger students are being placed in AP courses and stressed out of their minds.
On the other side of the coin was me. I taught American Government at the continuation high school. I loved it. I missed my calling, but then again, I was just some “art guy” filling an open class period or two. I never wanted my kids to feel like they had a “leftover” so I made sure to give them the best I had. Often, I would research to find out what programs I could participate in to make me “smarter” on the subject. I brought in my state government as well as my local government officials to talk to the kids about “how government works.” Then, I found a program called, “We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution.” I wrote to my congressman, Mike Honda, and he sponsored me. They paid for me to study at Boston University. They said it was like grad school on steroids. I visited Paul Revere’s church, walked the Freedom Trail, went to Faneuil Hall, and got to see primary sources at the Boston Library because I asked good questions. And, yes, my claim to fame is I went to Harvard. Yeppers, went, walked around and left. But, because I utilized the resources via We the Citizen, I was honored with at San Jose State for working with the program and sat right next to John Carlos. AWESOME. Not only did I get to go and study, but they sent us home with a ton of books. And then I got class sets at different reading levels. It was a WOW moment for me. American Government came to life for me and especially my students.
But, I wasn’t an AP teacher. My kids were at the “low school.” So, does that make my class inferior to AP?
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“So, does that make my class inferior to AP?”
Short answer, NO.
Thank you, You have explained well what kind of academic trap AP actually is, and it is far more hype than it is educationally beneficial.
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I don’t really get this. What classes exactly are AP courses being compared to? College level classes at Ivy League or top ranked universities or liberal arts colleges? Or the “here’s a dull history textbook, read this chapter and answer the questions at the end” high school classes that bored me out of my mind at my middle class public school in the late 1970s? Not until I got to college did I even hear of AP classes or exams, although like Diane Ravitch I took 3 SAT subject tests and scored high, not because I was particularly well-educated in those subjects.
I thought the DBQ questions that were part of the AP curriculum were great, and helped students think about using evidence and logic, as opposed to them memorizing dates and “4 reasons for the Civil War”.
Frankly, I would take the critical thinking skills of the young 18 -25 year olds raised with “too much AP tests” over the critical thinking skills of the much older voting age population who vote for Trump and Republicans who went to high school long before AP for all existed.
Some AP teachers are amazing. Some aren’t. The amazing ones would be amazing if they taught non-AP classes and the mediocre ones would not. And in my opinion, a student will learn more from a mediocre AP teacher because the curriculum is at least more thoughtful than from that mediocre teacher teaching from a textbook.
As a high school senior I took a couple classes at our local community/state college. None of them was particularly challenging or advanced. I don’t believe those local college class credits would have been accepted by the private 4 year college where I enrolled (although it didn’t even occur to me to ask). But my kids’ AP classes were much better the “real college” classes I took.
AP classes should be honors classes. Not “AP for all”, but I don’t see them as any different than a high school students choosing a class called ‘honors’ instead of regular. The same pressure to choose the advanced class is there for students who aspire to very selective colleges, whether it is AP or not.
But I don’t think the college board should be making money. But every high school should offer advanced versions of classes for students who want that and if an AP class serves that function, I don’t see the problem. My old, mediocre public high school now offers AP classes for students who want them and it sounds like students have a much better choice than I did, despite the population of students having shrunk to a fraction of what it used to be.
Colleges can choose to accept or not accept AP classes. My kid went to one that did and had they wanted, they could have finished early. It’s not a bad thing for kids to have that choice.
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“Some AP teachers are amazing. Some aren’t.”
Very true.
But what I have noticed is that there are lots of teachers who LOVE to call themselves “AP teachers.” Or, if asked, “What do you teach?” they answer with “Advanced Placement chemistry, or history, or whatever. It’s sort of like teachers – and I’ve heard plenty of them do it – describe themselves as “gifted teachers.”
As to the “honors” thing, academic tracking is like the SAT or AP, lots of hype, but short on educational benefit.
A very quick summation of the research is that the effects of academic tracking are pernicious. The “gains” for those in the upper tracks are minimal and the negative consequences for those in the lower tracks are long-lasting. The best predictor of the track a kid is in at the high school level is the one in which he’s placed in first grade.
As Jeannie Oakes has written, “it is safe to conclude that there is little evidence to support any of the assumptions about tracking.”
Since academic tracking groups are determined on the basis of “reading-related skills and classroom behavior,” the more accurate term is performance grouping. And since minority and low-income students tend to arrive at school with fewer academic and socialization “skills,” invariably they get placed in the lower tracks and groups.
Gene Glass has noted that “assignment to a low track is seldom followed by later reassignment to middle or high tracks.” Thus, since “prior performance is the strongest determinant of how advanced a course the student takes”, and since the tracking and grouping take place on entry to public school, students placed in low tracks early on are still in those tracks in high school. Perhaps that’s why tracking is implicated not only in creating but also in maintaining the Black-White achievement gap .
Jeannie Oakes has written most passionately on the issue of tracking. Oakes says that “tracking does not increase student achievement…in fact, appears to be quite the opposite..Tracking seems to retard the academic progress of many students…and promote school misbehavior and dropping out.”
If we are to prepare future citizens ask questions; to analyze and interpret data; to construct explanations; to obtain, evaluate and communicate information; to “engage in argument from evidence;” and to understand and commit to the core values and principles of democratic governance, then tracking will simply not suffice.
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“Ain’t necessarily all that” but, in my experience, not as bad as Democracy makes out either. I taught about half and half of my twenty plus high school years teaching AP and non-AP courses. Without question my AP World courses were more rigorous, content rich, and engaged critical thinking and developed more varied analytical skills than my non-AP courses. Maybe this reflects some my own limitations or that the AP courses got the better second half of my teaching career. I wouldn’t want to suggest there are no problems with the College Board or AP course curricula or the AP juggernaut over college prep. From what I saw students should probably not be allowed to take more than two or three AP courses at a time. They require a significant amount of homework reading, of course. And with the ridiculous teaching workloads in public high schools (in the humanities, anyway) there are plenty of teachers not up for the challenge or literally driven by time constraints into turning their assigned AP courses test-prep mills. So, sure, there are problems with AP courses. But I saw many many students, super majorities, by their own accounts in year-end anonymous surveys, profess benefits from AP that was rarely available to them elsewhere.
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Do some students “benefit” from taking AP courses and tests? Sure. But, according to the research, students who benefit the most are “students who are well-prepared to do college work and come from the socioeconomic groups that do the best in college are going to do well in college.”
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As an AP teacher and AP reader, I want to point out that some districts or even states REQUIRE all students to take the exams, and pay for them, whether the students are accepted to colleges which give credit or not. If accepted to a college that won’t give credit, the student sometimes will just draw pictures. Also, the colleges and universities often give extra GPA bonus credit for honors, AP, or IB courses. Doesn’t matter what the high schools do with gpa; it matters only whether the colleges give those bonus points or include rewards for taking challenging coursework.
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This is all part of the problem Do you know WHY some schools require students to take the AP exams? Because so many students were NOT taking them.
I know that lots of states have required in-state colleges to accept an AP test score of “3” (the most common score, equivalent to a “C” or “C+”) or better for entry-level college credit, and some states (Texas, Florida, for example)) PAY teachers for AP test scores of “3” or better, but which states REQUIRE AP students to take the AP exam(s)?
As to the awarding points for AP courses to boost GPA — which is WHY lots of students take AP — here’s what an extensive research study at the University of California system found:
“the best predictor of both first- and second-year college grades” is unweighted high school grade point average, and a high school grade point average “weighted with a full bonus point for AP…is invariably the worst predictor of college performance.”
By the way, it is not the colleges and universities who give extra points for GPA, it’s the schools. Most college admissions officers do not take weighted GPAs at face value. They “recalculate” to a “core GPA,” effectively unweighting the weighted.
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